Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy

Why are immigrants from Mexico and Latin America such an affectively charged population for political conservatives?

More than a decade before the election of Donald Trump, vitriolic and dehumanizing rhetoric against migrants was already part of the national conversation. Situating the contemporary debate on immigration within America’s history of indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery, the Mexican-American War, and Jim Crow, Cristina Beltran reveals white supremacy to be white democracy-a participatory practice of racial violence, domination, and exclusion that gave white citizens the right to both wield and exceed the law. Still, Beltran sees cause for hope in growing movements for migrant and racial justice.

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